Hillary Rodham Clinton: 1969
Is There Any Reason for the Washington Post to Exist? No.

How much backup did David Frum get back in 2009 when he wrote his "Waterloo" piece warning about the self-made hell into which the Republicans were descending?

Nancy LeTourneau: The Republican Waterloo: "The so-called “right-wing media” has ejected the GOP leadership from their epistemic bubble...

...As Oliver Darcy wrote, that leaves the GOP with nowhere to go to get their message out:

These Republicans have effectively been exiled from the conservative news media, leaving them with a problem. “They don’t have any place to go. How else do you get your message out? You can’t do it in the mainstream. This is the way you reach conservatives,” Ziegler said. “We have taught conservatives for many years to trust nothing other than what they hear in conservative media. Yet the conservative media has now proven to be untrustworthy.”...

In 2009... David Frum wrote the piece that got him ejected from the Republican Party. He simply titled it “Waterloo”:

A huge part of the blame for today’s disaster attaches to conservatives and Republicans ourselves.... We made a strategic decision.... No negotiations, no compromise, nothing. We were going for all the marbles. This would be Obama’s Waterloo.... We followed the most radical voices in the party and the movement, and they led us to abject and irreversible defeat.... I’ve been on a soapbox for months now about the harm that our overheated talk is doing to us. Yes it mobilizes supporters – but by mobilizing them with hysterical accusations and pseudo-information, overheated talk has made it impossible for representatives to represent and elected leaders to lead.... Talk radio thrives on confrontation and recrimination…If Republicans succeed – if they govern successfully in office and negotiate attractive compromises out of office – Rush’s listeners get less angry. And if they are less angry, they listen to the radio less, and hear fewer ads for Sleepnumber beds....

That has always struck me as one of the most prescient things ever written about the current state of the Republican Party. He ties together the escalating feedback loop that resulted from a strategy of total obstruction and hysterical accusations in right wing media…and he did it six years ago. Republicans made a fateful choice back then to tie their prospects to a medium addicted to rage and the conspiracy theories that fuel it. That came back to haunt them with the candidacy of Donald Trump. Now they find themselves between a rock and a hard place...

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